


To Kneel Before the Throne

by Banhus



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 08:38:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13291191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Banhus/pseuds/Banhus
Summary: Starfleet isn’t winning this war, he is; there is no throne to kneel before and beg forgiveness.





	To Kneel Before the Throne

Burnham falls in at his heel the moment he’s back aboard the _Discovery_ , telling him about the developments in the Spore drive made in his absence, how Lieutenant Commander Saru’d dealt with a warbird, the supply convoy the Klingons have been harassing for hours. It’s unexpected, the warmth her steady commentary makes him feel, like coming home to find bread already rising in the oven and the kettle set on for tea. He wasn’t anticipating Burnham taking to him so quickly, not with the shadow of Captain Georgiou looming so large over her, but he supposes rescuing her from a prison colony must count for something. She finishes her report just as he slips back into the captain’s chair - Vulcan timing, he supposes - and hovers awkwardly at his elbow.

“I’m... sorry,” she says.

“It’s just a funeral, Burnham, no need to get sentimental,” he tells her, pulling up their trajectory on the viewscreen. The screen is unfocused, it looks overlaid with mist. Irritated, he increases the contrast.

Burnham shifts her weight awkwardly from one foot to another. “I know you were close,” she offers.

“Black alert,” he calls, and, because the bridge lights are cutting into his eyes and he has a headache, he tilts his head at Burnham and drawls: “small talk, really? Thought Vulcans didn’t believe in that.”

He sees the moment it connects; she stands a little straighter, and bites out a “sir,” as the ship blurs into mycelial space. Lorca thinks he’ll never get used to that feeling, falling through time, breathless and without sense. He remembers going to the sea, as a small child, and walking too far into the surf. The tide had knocked his feet out from under him, dragged him beneath the water and kept him under. It’s the sense of being spit back out, pushed shivering onto the shore by waves as they emerge in the sky over the burning husk of the USS _Ceres_. He blinks at the ship once, eyes aching, and begins to issue commands.

\--

All dead Starfleet personnel get an official memorial service, and official Starfleet policy is that anyone gone for over six months is legally dead, absent extenuating circumstances. Lieutenant Tyler crossed that line, came back, and now makes constant uncomfortable jokes about being legally deceased as if needing to reassure himself that it’s fine, it’s real, he’s safe. Lorca can understand that. He’s walking through the still-smoldering corridors of the _Ceres_ , heart in his throat, trying to tell which parts of the wreckage will be of use, might still divulge some useful information about the Klingons’ weapon capacities other than _too much, too many_. The air smells like smoke, and seared flesh, and the coppery ionized tang of photon weapons. Everything the Klingons do is so hyperreal and immediate, it makes the rest of his life ring false in comparison.

Burnham is scanning the remains of an auxiliary navigational panel. She’s found a smashed-open medkit to stand on, and is stretching to reach the twisted filaments through a gap near the ceiling. The kit wobbles under her weight, and she stabilizes herself with a quick push against the wall plating. At the end of her sleeve, there’s a small gash where the fabric has charred and curled up, revealing welted, red-tinged skin underneath.

“You need any help with that?” he offers, despite himself.

“I’ve got it, Captain.”

“I’ll get the lower ones. Hang tight up there.” Lorca wedges open the panel near Burnham’s knee, and starts pulling out the wires. The Klingons must have knocked _something_ out to prevent the ship from trying to warp, and since the engines are fine, it’s probably navigation. Burnham’s leg wobbles. He holds out a hand just in case.

“Perhaps -” Burnham begins, and there’s a sharp crack, she cries out in surprise, and the fire blast doors come slamming down at either end of the corridor. The emergency lights flicker on with a crackle, glazing the floor in blue light for a moment, before the redundant systems give out. His first, immediate reaction is _relief_ ; the low-grade twist of pain behind his eyes unwinds, and, practiced, he finds the wall in the dark by touch, letting himself slip down it to sit on the floor. He fishes a chemical light out of his pocket, snaps it, and tosses it up to Burnham.

Lorca spends ten minutes rebooting auxiliary power for the corridor. It’s ugly, inelegant work, the soldering he's done, wires twisted together, but it gives Burnham enough power to finish her analysis and get the fire-doors open. The remaining half hour it takes her to do so, Lorca sits, legs stretched out on the floor, and watches her work. He’s tired, proper tired, hasn’t slept well in days. The quiet hum of the tricorder and chink of her tools against the edge of the panel are oddly calming. He used to talk too much when he was tired. Back when he was young, back in the academy. To Kat, mostly, but sometimes to friends, or people he’d met in bars. Words always came easy to him, and he enjoyed the easy, meandering honesty of late-night conversation. It’s a fault he knew to correct when he made Captain.

Old desires fade slow, though. Looking up at Burnham, intent on her duty, he thinks of saying, _I hardly knew her at all_. He thinks of saying _I almost killed her. I didn’t, but I didn’t save her, either_. Despite everything she’s been through, Burnham’s still Starfleet to her very core, all hope and faith and empathy. If he could make her understand, it would be a little like absolution, and there’s a thought to be wary of, he thinks. Starfleet isn’t winning this war, he is; there is no throne to kneel before and beg forgiveness.

\--

After they’ve rescued what can be rescued from the _Ceres_ , Lorca finishes typing up and sending the report to Starfleet Command. He’s halfway through a glass of bourbon and hiding from the _Ceres_ evacuees in his office when Stamets, Tyler and Burnham stumble in. They’re all five-syllable words, talking about warp signatures and a warbird that the _Ceres_ managed to bust up just enough to put a crack in their dilithium containment.

“We can track them,” Burnham says.

“We can hunt them down,” Tyler says.

“We can hunt down _one_ of them,” Stamets corrects. “We don’t have signatures on the others, so we don’t know how many of them -”

Lorca cuts him off: “Yes. Good. Go,” and makes shooing motions at them until they leave.

Briefly, he considers dropping the evacuees off on the nearest Starbase before pursuing the Klingons. There’s no time, though; it’s not like the Klingons won’t just attack the next Federation ship, and the next, until they’re stopped. By the time they catch up, there might be another ship like the Ceres, reduced to a charred husk. He, Tyler and Burnham reach the bridge before Stamets gets hooked up to the spore drive. Lorca uses the time to settle in his chair and send the ship to red, then black alert. Saru has used Stamets’ calculations to plot a course that drops them out of the mycelial dimension just in front of where the Klingons will be in three, two -

A blink, a gap.

Three Klingon ships howl out of the black, swerving wildly to avoid their shields. _Discovery_ ’s torpedoes are hitting in blossoms of light, beautiful and painful, and it’s like a melody looping back around; like the hundreds of times they weren’t too late to save the Klingons’ victims, bursting into the sky from nowhere in a blaze of fire sending _be not afraid_ -

Five warbirds are further off on their scanner - there to rendezvous with the others, most likely - and Detmer flips the whole ship around, giving Tyler the best possible shot. Lorca grins. His crew is marvelous like this. It’s like watching immaculately trained hounds running the prey to ground for him. There’ll be an end to it all someday, and they will pick up and go to their best destiny, but for now, they trade bitten off commands and bits of information at each other, perfectly in time. Kat used to talk to him about giving up captaining, one day, how fine an Admiral he’d make, back before the _Buran_. Her throat had been sticky with sweat under his hand the last time he’d seen her. They dip under a warbird, catching the edge of a photon torpedo with a nacelle, and their shields boom under the impact. Lorca pushes himself half out of the chair, yelling, “fire, fire _now_!”

Two more ships go up in flames, and he’s watching too raptly to care about his eyes. Pain lances through them. Clinging to his chair, he keeps watching as the _Discovery_ leaps after the others, the air high with electricity, his body humming with it.

He hadn’t felt anything, flipping Kat onto her back and holding a phaser to her head. There’d been a clear, high ringing noise, like a tapped bell, and then he’d gradually settled back into his body. His heart came back first, thrumming unevenly. Then his hands, and his legs; every place he was pressed against her. She was warm, he’d thought, oddly detached. He’d wanted her, just hours before, could still taste the salt where he’d bitten down on her shoulder, but reaching for the memory felt like scrabbling to grab onto a pane of glass. He hadn’t been able to feel anything. _Yell_ , he’d thought.  _Apologise. Cry. Something_. He’d forced his eyes wider, shifted off her, sat on the bed. He couldn’t feel anything, but he knew ought to; he’d set the phaser aside and scrubbed a hand through his hair in what he thought shame would look like. She had yelled at him, he’d begged.

“I can’t tell if this is really you,” she had said, and that had struck him as a profoundly stupid thing to say. Of course it was him; he didn’t stop being himself when he was lying, or hateful, or scrabbling about in the dark. It was all just him, and he was present for every moment of it.

 _Discovery_ takes out the remaining Klingons with hardly any trouble. In the end, it’s one of the easier battles they’ve had recently. Lorca’s ship is a little scratched up, but nothing they’d even need to dock at a Starbase to fix. The bridge crew lean back in their seats, Saru paces out his nervous energy. Everyone breathes easier.

“Good work,” Lorca tells them. In the quiet, Tyler turns to him and smiles, then flashes Burnham what Lorca assumes is the Vulcan version of a fist-bump across the bridge.

“I want full diagnostics on the ship by eight-hundred hours,” says Lorca. “Lieutenant Commander Saru, Check with the CMO if the crew of the _Ceres_ need anything. Lieutenant Stamets, take us to Starbase Copernicus, if you please.” Outside the window, the dying embers of the warbirds are winking out one by one. Lorca lingers on the bridge until they drop into mycellial space to watch them. Tyler follows him off the bridge, slotting himself into the turbolift just as Lorca pushes the button.

“We got them,” Tyler says, low and happy. “They’re done.”

“Sure are,” Lorca says. “I wish we’d been a bit quicker, though, don’t you?”

“Yes, Sir. But they’re _done_.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Lorca looks at Tyler. His chin’s up, and he’s staring straight ahead. The cast of his mouth is just shy of vicious.

“I promised you a shot at the Klingons, didn’t I,” Lorca says, and because that doesn’t quite seem the right thing, he briefly clasps Tyler’s shoulder on his way out of the lift.

\--

Lorca never told Kat, but he’s only ever been convinced he was going to die in the line of duty twice. He doesn’t know what she’d make of it. Whether she’d call it rampaging overconfidence, the way he felt quietly sure that all those shots taken at him over the years would miss, or a necessary self-preservation instinct. He’ll never know now, he supposes. The glass of bourbon he poured himself is still on his desk, safely balanced on the gyroscope coaster that’s likely made some Federation citizen a lot of patent money. He looks at it pensively for a bit, then shuts off the lights and goes to bed. In the dark, patterns of light play out beneath his eyelids; Burnham’s hands, backlit against the sparking panels, the burning _Ceres_ , Tyler’s silhouette on the bridge against lit-up space.

That was the second time Lorca thought he’d die, the ship where he met Lieutenant Tyler. The first was the long stretch after the _Buran_ , where Lorca didn’t feel there was enough of him to get up, the next time he was hurt; like a stray phaser-blast would just scatter him as chaff to the wind. Then one day he was hurt, and he did get up, and get up angry, and that was that. He didn’t want to die anymore once he reached the Klingon prison ship, but the first night there, the thought occurred to him that he likely would, and it settled into him with a shiver.

Lorca remembers months ago tilting his head back against the rusting wall of the prison cell, eyes pinched mostly shut in agony. Tyler lay on the floor beside him, curled up into a miserable, tight-wound pile. Lorca watched him, through the milky haze of his ruined eyes; the small, choked-up breaths Tyler took in sleep, the way he clutched at the edges of his own uniform. Lorca had put his hand on his ankle as he was drifting off, in, hell, solidarity, something, he didn’t know. Lorca wasn’t going to die alone. Ash was warm under his palm, very human, a kindness he wasn’t expecting.

Lorca thought of the way he felt when they first pinned the Captain’s badge on him, back on the bridge of the _Buran_. Ash had looked so stupidly grateful when they threw him in the cell, like the cow-eyed _Buran_ bridge crew, clapping at him as if there was something to applaud.

Cursing softly, Lorca rubbed at his eyes with his palms. Ash shifted, unsettled by the movement.

“Go back to sleep. I’m sorry,” Lorca mouthed at his turned back.


End file.
